The fashionableness of such places is fleeting, but whether a project is ephemeral or monumental, minimalist or ornate, rational or nutty, the city seems to embrace almost any creative impulse and revel in the strange juxtapositions that result.

Then the imaginary spectators would fall a-talking of the fashionableness of bicycling, — how judges And stockbrokers and actresses and, in fact, all the best people rode, and how that it was often the fancy of such great folk to shun the big hotels, the adulation of urban crowds, and seek, incognito, the cosy quaintnesses of village life.

It was as if the idolised maxim of his own youth ‘Show no emotion,’ and all the fashionableness that, under the aegis of his mother Emily, had clung about Park Lane, were revisiting him in the shape of this languid beggar.

But as, gradually, perhaps owing to the war or through the rapid crystallisation of the long-delayed fashionableness with which all the necessary but till then invisible elements had long since saturated the Verdurin Salon, that salon had been opened to a new society and as the “faithfuls”, at first the bait for this new society, had ended by being less and less frequently invited, so a parallel phenomenon was taking place in